by thecustomhouse

I feel like this quote really addresses where I am at this point in my life (although in no way a reflection of my own beloved parents).

CHAPTER IV
THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE

“Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to
be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective.
Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of
those who are driven early in life into too conservative an
attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He
had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability
was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion.
He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people
had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked
about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful
attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father
cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in
for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer
years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between
the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which
he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a
more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand
into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the
former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had
pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.
Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt
from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he
revolted into the only thing left — sanity.”